Predictions thread

[BackAgain]

I like Brian Beutler's predictions:

The Supreme Court will act with surprising speed to invalidate Donald Trump’s “immunity” defense for his role in the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election.

Many credulous liberals and anti-Trump conservatives will overinterpret it as a moment of legitimation for the judiciary, and scold those of us who rightly note that the court is stolen and needs to be expanded or otherwise reformed.

Their hubris will be short lived, as the five most corrupt justices (Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett) use the pretext I described here to delay Trump’s trial for several months, making it practically impossible for him to be tried before the 2024 election.

After making a trial impossible, six justices (the five above plus Roberts) will then rule that Trump can’t be removed from the ballot if he hasn’t been convicted of any crimes for attempting to overturn the 2020 election. The “stop overreacting” crowd will not reassess its reflexive defense of the Court.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg will throw everyone for a loop when he reclaims his trial date in the hush-money case. The same crew will resume tut-tutting Bragg for trying Trump over relatively minor offenses, ignoring the many state prosecutors who point out that the case is open and shut and New York tries businessmen for comparable offenses all the time.

Trump will be convicted of falsifying business records, his sentence will be suspended, and he will head into the election with his federal trials in abeyance until after November.

Economic sentiment will continue to improve as influential liberals become less reticent to observe that the economy is booming and has been for many months. Material developments, such as a slow interest-rate reduction by the federal reserve, will help.

Joe Biden’s approval rating will climb a bit with improved economic sentiment and the reintroduction of Trump’s unhinged behavior to daily mainstream life. The liberals who want to believe politics is little more than a mechanistic extension of material conditions will insist this is purely an artifact of economic well being, which they’ll insist operates on a lag that had somehow gone unnoticed in the literature before.

Benjamin Netanyahu will be deposed, tried, and imprisoned; Prime Minister Benny Gantz will draw down the air war in Gaza, secure the release of remaining, living hostages, drive some Hamas leaders into exile, and treat those who remain as valid targets for assassination. This will put a fine point on how damaging and unjustified Netanyahu’s post-10/7 conduct was, and how unnecessary it was for the Biden administration to align itself with him for months. But the political upshot in the U.S. will be a reconsolidation of Biden’s base and the proof of concept that democratic governments can hold their corrupt former leaders accountable under the law.

Joe Biden will win the election by a larger margin than he did in 2020.

Donald Trump will try to incite another insurrection, but it will fail, because he no longer controls the government; his trial for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election will begin in early 2025; his co-conspirators will be charged in a separate indictment.

The incoming Democratic Senate majority will be 50 votes, but with both Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema retired, Democrats will have the power they need to codify Roe by making an exception to the filibuster rules. Liberals will spend the lame-duck period trying to hold the line so that Dems don’t chicken out in January 2025.

Republicans will waste the lame-duck period trying to extort Biden into pardoning Trump or using their expiring congressional powers to “expose” evidence that his cases should be tossed. As time goes on they will realize how fruitless this is and instead descend into the civil war they should have had after 2020, but deferred because Trump insisted the election was stolen.

Biden will decline to pardon Trump, but he will soften the blow for MAGA-Americans by offering Ivanka an ambassadorship to somewhere temperate but unimportant. She will accept it because she’s as vain as her father, and will want to redeem the family name; this will be extremely annoying to the anti-Trump movement, but surprisingly effective at managing the idiotic discourse around her father’s looming imprisonment.

Cancer diagnoses will continue to rise in the U.S. because we’ve done little to make our lived environments (pollution, diet, PFAs, etc.) less carcinogenic.

The rate of cancer deaths will fall as miraculous new therapies (short of cures) become more commonplace as treatments.

Despite many disruptive and deadly extreme weather events, global average temperatures will fall slightly as the acute warming effects of a 2022 underwater volcanic eruption in Tonga dissipate (read: water vapor falls out of the stratosphere). Lazy and/or cynical people will cite this as evidence that global warming is fake or reversing or not a problem, and it will be very annoying.

Russia will withdraw behind the lines it created when it occupied Crimea in 2014.

I will end 2024 one year younger than I was when it began.

Elon Musk will shut down Twitter, but only after his efforts to use it to help Trump win the election fail; his net worth will fall by at least 40 percent.

lol.